


Jane of the Forgotten People

by tronjolras



Category: Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Genre: And so do I, F/F, I turned this in for an actual college grade, Its Ch 17 but Rochester is a woman, Jane has a breakdown, Modern AU, Mutual Pining, btw St. Jane is the patron saint of forgotten people, but in a cool way for Elizabeth, everything's fair in ove and angst, lesbian love triangle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-10 15:46:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15294786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tronjolras/pseuds/tronjolras
Summary: Jane finds herself paralyzed by her attraction to her employer and resolves to make a stand, but when Ms. Rochester comes after her, she doesn't know what to do.“Jane you look upset.”“I’m not upset,” I said hastily, and a little shrilly. “I swear, it's all fine”





	Jane of the Forgotten People

Elizabeth was already in the kitchen when Adele and I came downstairs. She was leaning back on the counter with a mug of coffee in one hand and her phone in the other, scrolling through emails. She was dressed for the day in slim trousers, a simple white blouse, and sleek low heels that altogether, I’m sure, cost more than my entire semester. She still wore her reading glasses that made her look warmer and a little more mortal. In an hour, she’d put her contacts in and complete her transformation into Elizabeth Rochester, CEO of Mason Industrial. But for now, she was only Elizabeth. 

It was nice to say good morning to her, to receive her lazy, not-quite-awake-yet smile. She set her phone down and perked herself up for Adele. The six-year-old, always too energetic in the morning for either of us, rushed to her and hugged her around her waist. 

“Good morning, babe,” Elizabeth crooned. After one more stolen sip of coffee, she set the mug aside too and hugged her back. 

“Morning Mommy!” she said. Adele didn’t usually look like Elizabeth except for when she smiled. Her hair bounced in her pigtails. With her little first-grader prep school uniform, she looked like she belonged in a catalogue. But even through her exertions, her pigtails held, and I patted myself on the back for finally figuring it out. 

“Good morning, Jane,” she said to me. 

“Good morning ma’am,” I responded. I turned away from them and to the pantry, hiding my reddening face. Elizabeth had gone to China for three months. I told myself everyday those three months that I could not love her. She had been back for two days, and already I forgot my promise to myself. She made me blush so easily—one look, three words. “Cheerios?” I called back over my shoulder. 

Adele paused her ramblings to her mother (she had three months of things to catch her up on) and sighed. “Again.”

“Cheerio, Della!” Elizabeth said in an exaggeration of her posh English accent, making Adele giggle. I grabbed the box, stopped by the fridge for the milk and set them on the table. 

“Would you get the juice, please, Adele?” I asked. I didn’t want to tear her away from Elizabeth, especially after she just got her back, but there were things to do, school to go to, a life to get on with, and the tiny grudge that sustained me through the months of Elizabeth’s absence. 

Adele clung to her mother like a spider monkey until Elizabeth volunteered: “I’ll get the glasses out.” 

“Are you eating with us?” I didn’t mean to sound so surprised. Elizabeth stared at me over the rim of her glasses. “I mean, should I get out three bowls, ma’am?” 

“I don’t think so,” she said. She plucked three short glasses from the cupboard and I didn’t tell her that we usually used the tall glasses for breakfast. “But I’ll take a glass of apple juice if I’m allowed.”

Adele, having safely delivered the pitcher to the table, climbed onto her chair and watched Elizabeth and me set the table. “Remind me Jane, I purchased some prints in Beijing that I’d like you to look at.”

“Oh! I—” I was about to choke out something about Asian art not really being my area of study, but I didn’t want to sound ungrateful. And I was excited, ecstatic to see them. It meant she thought of me. “I’d like that,” I said. The spoon and the bowl I put in front of Adele clattered and startled. 

“What a bargain, eh Della?” Elizabeth said to Adele as she began to pour out the juice into three glasses. “My nanny’s also an art historian.”

“She’s my nanny.” It was Adele’s favorite joke, to be able to catch her mother out. She kneeled up in the chair and took a glass from Elizabeth. 

I smiled through my insincere admonition: “Please sit down, Adele, and don’t tease your mother,” I finished with an indulgent tone. Eight months ago, when I got the position, I was nervous and unsure of myself, but spending every day with her taught me to relax my method and truly chastise only when needed. But it was rarely needed, Adele was a wonderful kid, if a little spoiled by her mother and the staff, and desperately lonely. I loved her, even if she didn’t always listen to my directions, I thought as she rose to her feet on the chair. 

Elizabeth sat in the chair beside Adele. “Haven’t you taught her how to share then?” Elizabeth teased me. 

I looked at her fully and then back at Adele, “You share well at school, don’t you?”

“I don’t wanna share Miss Jane!” Adele cried and stuck her tongue out at her mother. Elizabeth laughed and eased Adele back onto her butt. 

“What a shame,” Elizabeth muttered as she offered me a glass too. I was halfway through pouring a second bowl of cereal and felt suddenly like a deer in the headlights. I swallowed and continued. 

~~~

Jamie was just getting in for the day, so the kitchen was no longer ours and we were displaced into the hall. Adele went to get her back pack from her bedroom and for the first time since she returned from her three months away, Elizabeth and I were alone. 

I was never one to giggle or sigh, my crushes never inspired an insuppressible giddiness, and reflection only ever brought me cutting anxiety. 

When I first met her, I thought Elizabeth looked like a vampire. She looked cold and aloof. She was what everyone wanted the widow of a rich man to be. I had forgiven myself for judging her so quickly because it took me so little time to see her warmth. When she returned yesterday, she looked like she had the first time I saw her and, even though I had no right to, I was afraid she had forgotten me. 

“I was thinking, if you liked them, we could hang the prints in the hall near your bedroom. It’s always been so wretchedly bare.”

“It was nice of you to think of, ma’am.”

Elizabeth was much taller than me, most people were. She leaned back against the opposite wall. She opened her mouth and thought about forming a word, but we heard Adele’s feet on the stairs. Elizabeth pushed herself off the wall and went toward the foyer. I followed, and she spoke, “I’m inviting a few friends over tonight. After you put Adele to bed, I want you to come down. I won’t have you moping alone around the house like you were when I left.”

I would have argued with her if it weren’t true, and still true. “Okay.”

She smiled and then Adele was between us.

~~~

Elizabeth missed Christmas while she was away. I learned that in Adele’s six years of life, Elizabeth had missed two Christmases. One third of Adele’s Christmases. 

I was in the car with Frieda. Apparently, the party was a spur of the moment thing. She had not told Jamie or Frieda about it; I had the unsettling suspicion that I was the first person she told, and that she thought of it only a few seconds before she said it. She must have told Frieda and Jamie while I took Adele to school because when I came back, she had gone to the office, Jamie was seething, and Frieda was trying to calm him down. In the end, Jamie made a grocery list and sent Frieda and me on our way. 

Frieda liked to chat, and Elizabeth’s return gave her a lot to chat about. She never minded if I let her talk. She told me once that she thought my quietness was a Catholic school thing and I just nodded in agreement, crossed my arms and continued looking out the window. Elizabeth’s house was in a wealthy neighborhood where every house was obscured from the other by forest. The only indication that we were on a residential street at all were the glimpses of asphalt blinking by, and a little further through the trees, a wrought iron gate if you looked close. The road wound around trees and the bend of a creek; it was easy not to see things coming, so Frieda drove slow.

Elizabeth missed Christmas, but Adele’s birthday was in March, so if she didn’t leave in the next two months, she’d be there for that. 

She was in Rome when I began working for her. Frieda was the only one I needed to answer to then. One month in Rome and then she was home for four months and then she was gone for three. I counted them and counted the driveways and then we were at the store. 

Jamie only liked to buy from the World Grocer on the edge of the city. It was set on a sunny corner and everything was in that orangey-brown wood, a deeply yellowed white, and an earthy olive green. They all knew Frieda and me by now, but the first few times I had gone in, I could see everyone’s eyes telling me I belonged in the dollar mart down the block. One cashier even asked if I was Frieda’s daughter. She gaped that a girl wearing off-brand sneakers should work for Ms. Rochester. I still hadn’t dared go in alone. I stuck close by Frieda’s side and pushed the cart while she scrutinized and plucked, and squinted to read Jamie’s scrawl, and crossed off each item with a nod of satisfaction.

“Who’s going to be there tonight?” 

She looked surprised and I realized that I might have interrupted her, though I couldn’t be sure. “Umm…” She held up two jars of pesto, put one back on the shelf, and put the other one in the cart before answering. “I can’t say I know for sure, really. Young Mr. Mason will probably be around.” I nodded. Sometimes, when one is a fifth wife, one has a stepson that is only three years younger than oneself, and one gets along with him much better than one gets along with his father. Or so Elizabeth told me once. 

She paused at the olive bar and tapped her fingers on the edge of the cart. “Now I don’t know what sort of company she keeps nowadays. It’s been quite a while since she’s done anything at the house, you know, with Adele there and all. I remember a Blanche—no! Blair Ingram that she brought around once or twice. She lives in the city. Then I guess Mr. Mason would invite some people.” 

“What do you mean she brought her around?” 

Frieda looked up from her study of the olives and blushed. “Well… you know.” She looked around like the olives to our left and the pesto to our right were listening. “She’s not exactly   
secretive about—”

“I know!” I said hastily, narrowly avoiding a long, embarrassed, and circumlocutive explanation of Elizabeth Rochester’s post-marital lesbianism, of which I learned enough from the source herself during one of our long late talks before she had gone away. We used to pass in the hall, when she came from checking on Adele after I put her to bed and I was on my way to my own. Nine times out of ten, she’d convince me to go back downstairs with her and we’d sit in the mostly dark living room for hours, “So… Blair Ingram is…”

Frieda leaned in close. “Nothing really, I would say. There can’t be anything serious between them, else I think Ms. Rochester would say something, wouldn’t she?”

I shrugged back into my muteness. Out of any of us, I assume Frieda would know first. But Elizabeth was mysterious when she wanted to be. However, Frieda’s answer still didn’t temper my jealousy toward this Blair Ingram, whose existence I only learned of seconds ago. 

Frieda went back to the olive bar and started telling me a story that involved several bad olives, a furious Jamie, and a ruined hors d’oeuvre platter.

~~~

When Elizabeth discovered the nanny she hired had a quiet aspiration to go to art school and develop my paint skills for real, she brought me pamphlets and applications for every school in the city. She told me to pick one (preferably one that had a building named after the late Richard Mason, so she might have enough sway to get me in long after acceptance ended) and that she would take care of my tuition as long as I was a conscientious student and continued nannying to her standard—or to Frieda’s standard which was more intimidating.  
At first, I refused. It would be too much for her to fund my entire college education, especially if I only wanted to be an art major. I told her she wouldn’t be changing the world, that I wasn’t worth it. She had looked at me the way she always did, like she could see everything that I was all at once. “If you’re not worth it,” she said, “then tell me who is.”

In the end, we struck a deal. I scoured my memory for any half-talents I developed in childhood that I might be able to teach Adele, and I came up with piano, ice skating, riding a bike (I knew this was a long shot, but I could not imagine Elizabeth on the driveway trotting cautiously behind Adele as she pedaled her first two-wheeler in a slow, lumpy circle), tutoring her in reading, and of course: painting. 

I knew I would never feel that I had really made it up to Elizabeth, but I was happy to try. Besides, Adele liked our scheduled lessons. She was not particularly gifted in any of the subjects that I taught or in school, which frustrated Elizabeth who sometimes succumbed to the wunderkind myth, but my only requirements were that Adele learn something and, as far as my lessons went, that she had fun. 

We were camped out in the dining room with two easels and last weekend’s newspaper spread out over the shiny, varnished wood and a shared pallet of watercolors. I charged Adele with capturing the spiky flower arrangement in the center of the table. I had a roll of paper towels on hand and coasters under our mugs of paint water just to be safe and to make Frieda happy, who was far too stressed about getting the house ready for guests to deal with a potential spill. I played music from a Disney playlist as she as she and I sat silently working together. Sometimes she hummed, but our painting lessons were always more of a quiet exercise. 

I set my brush aside, happy with the preliminary shading of the vase and bouquet, and leaned over to watch Adele, pushing pigment into the rough paper until it pilled. I was about to correct her when we heard voices from the hall. 

Adele dropped her brush and rushed out of the room crying “Mommy! Mommy come see what I painted!”

I took the time to wash the abandoned brush before following her. 

Adele’s arms were wrapped around Elizabeth’s legs, and her cheek pressed against her hip. Elizabeth smiled down at her daughter and pet her hair while she asked “Why don’t you say ‘Mummy’ anymore? Did they finish Americanizing you while I was gone?” 

Another woman laughed. 

Beside Elizabeth stood a tall blond woman dressed for a night on the town. I had no doubt that this was Blair Ingram. She pried Adele off her and presented her to the woman with her hands on either shoulder. “Adele, I want you to meet Miss Ingram, she’s a friend of mine.” 

Adele looked down at the floor and retreated into her shyness like she did whenever she met someone new. 

Blair Ingram crouched down to the floor and faked a wide, bright, enthusiastic smile. “Hello!” she cooed like she was talking to a baby. Adele still did not look at her, so she ducked her head in the way of her gaze. “Your mommy’s told me so much about you!” 

At this point it sounded more like she was talking to a very small dog rather than a child. Adele flashed her eyes up to meet Blair’s for a second, murmuring a quick “Hi!” and then escaping Elizabeth’s grasp and gravitating toward me.

Elizabeth looked up and noticed me for the first time. “Good evening Miss Eyre. I just stopped home to change before tonight. We’ll be going out to dinner first, so we’re out of your hair when you put Adele to B-E-D.”

Adele sent a withering scowl at her mom which made me giggle, and Elizabeth too, knowing she was forgiven for forcing Adele to meet a stranger.   
“But we’ll be back soon,” she continued. She shifted her gaze to Adele meaningfully. “Do you think you could entertain Miss Ingram for a few minutes while I go up?” she asked.

As soon as Elizabeth disappeared upstairs, Blair’s face went blank. She stood up and began scrolling through her phone. Her lower lips stuck out in a cosmetically augmented, eternally glossed pout and she leaned back against the wall. 

I knew I should have waited, not judged a book by its cover, but my stupid, persistent crush on Elizabeth, her total disinterest in Adele, and the fact that she was more beautiful than I could ever hope to think about being, prevented me from looking much past her exterior. But Adele looked lost, verging on hurt, so I took her hand and walked up to Blair. I prodded Adele to ask a question, but she stayed silent, intimidated by the tall, annoyed looking stranger. “Ms. Rochester is looking forward to tonight,” I said.

“Hmm?” she flicked her eyes up and saw me, I think, for the first time. “Yeah.”

I felt the same instinct as Adele, to run away and hide. It was the instinct of lonely children. Mostly I wanted to go back into the dining room, with paints and flowers, things I understood. 

“Do you want to show Miss Ingram what you were painting?” I prompted Adele. She dropped my hand. 

“No.” She looked so dejected that my heart broke a little bit. I didn’t want to leave Blair in the hallway alone so Elizabeth would think we abandoned her but none of us were getting any more comfortable standing silently at the foot of the stairs. But there was nothing else to do. So I counted how many spindles on the stair case and the number of steps until finally, Elizabeth came back down, now dressed in well-tailored jeans and a dark, drapey tee shirt. 

Blair pushed herself off the wall. “Are we ready to go?”

Elizabeth kissed Adele goodbye, and likely goodnight. Then she stood in front of me. Her eyes lingered on me until my pleasant smile became awkward and strained. She giggled at my discomfort. “Just make sure you’re awake when we get back,” she said. “And try to have a good night.”

~~~

My palms were clammy and I didn’t think I could find my voice if I tried. My brain was locked in my skull, unable to reach any other part of my body and control it, only perceive. I looked at my hands with the same level of detachment that I had for the party around me. It felt like the only sense I could consult was my sight, but I could not make my eyes close, or move them away. But whatever they saw, they carried back to my brain—tormenting me with images of Elizabeth with Blair.

Like she asked me, after I put Adele to bed, I waited and through a series of events I couldn’t rightly order in my mind, I had ended up on the deck in the sixty-degree weather of the Carolinian winter surrounded by people I didn’t know and unable to look away from my employer and the woman I had no right to hate. 

Blair sat next to Elizabeth on the wicker couch on the opposite side of the wooden deck, so close their entire bodies were pressed together. For the first hour, Elizabeth kept looking over at my corner of the deck, my back against the cold brick of the house, locking eyes with me even as she left her hand on Blair’s bare knee, her long fingers running down Blair’s thigh and lingering while her gray eyes kept mine. I fell again into her dark eyes and remembered how things were before she left, our long conversations in the dark, her intoxicating frankness that seemed like it was only reserved for me. She’d only given us all one day’s warning before setting out to Beijing. She didn’t say goodbye to anyone but Adele and Frieda.

She looked at me now, the black tendrils of hair falling into her face not dampening the direct and captivating look. Then, just a second later, she threw her head back and laughed at something Blair said. The way Blair looked at Elizabeth’s exposed neck, stretched out, she eyes feasting on the flesh and the expensive necklace equally with the hunger of a vampire. Like a vampire, her effusiveness paralyzed me as she took Elizabeth for her own.

I was still in the corner I put myself in. Everyone else Elizabeth invited broke organically into a thousand different smaller conversations when they came into the house from dinner and I did not want to intrude. Blair’s equally attractive sister danced with Richard Mason, Jr. in the open space between us, to music coming from someone’s phone, boosted by the built-in speakers around the yard. Lynn and Eshton trade stories of the misspent, trust-funded youth they shared with Elizabeth in London. One of the Dent twins danced while the other took up the seat on the wicker couch that forced Elizabeth to be so close to Blair. And those were just the people whose names I remembered. 

They were all friends already. Even though they were in small groups, they would call over to each other to finish stories, deliver the punchlines, sneak in a joke when they saw the opportunity. Elizabeth called them her work associates when they first came, and I knew some of them were, but it was obvious they did more partying than business when they were together.

And who was I? I was just the nanny.  
Twenty-two and a veritable shut in—I was just invited to the party because my boss pitied me. I was there in my corner when the guests came, and I would be there when they left, like the chair I sat on, only the fairy lights strung up with the ivy around the trellis and the unflattering blue light of my phone to illuminate me. My thumb scrolled through old emails, pictures, texts, though I wasn’t looking down.

“I love this song!” Blair shouted as the music changed to something loud but not so upbeat as the one before. She stood up from the couch. I forgot how tall she was. With her stiletto heels, she was even taller, her legs even longer, and her skirt even shorter. “Lizzie, we have to dance!” she declared. She held out her hands to Elizabeth who flinched a little at being called “Lizzie.”

She looked up at the deck of people already dancing between the couch and my iron chair. For an instant, her gray eyes bore into me again, but her expression was unreadable. “Sorry love, I don’t know if—”

“C’mon!” Blair goaded. She grabbed Elizabeth’s hands before she offered them and pulled her up by the arms. Elizabeth, at least, was dressed more casually than Blair. Her shirt was low cut, and her jeans were slim, but it suited her; her outfit was refined and modern and fitting for a woman her age.  
I had been kicking myself all night. Elizabeth told me that tonight was going to be a laid-back affair. “Just a few good friends,” she assured me when I caught her on the stair after she got back from dinner with Blair and before the rest of the guests arrived. I threw on a fresh pair of jeans that were not stained by a redirected watercolor, a gray tank top, my sweater and tennis shoes. I knew I wouldn’t fit in with all of Elizabeth’s rich, model friends, but I would at least be presentable. But I just “looked comfortable” according to Blair when the initial introductions were made.

What was I still doing there? Adele was asleep, I had put her to bed myself, but then, there Elizabeth was saying “Jane, remember to come back down when you’re done. Have a little fun for once, Jane.” It had taken me all day to work up the courage, but I finally told her I wouldn’t know what to do, but she wouldn’t have it. “Jane,” she looked down at me and smiled fondly, like she had before. She shook her head and repeated, “Jane, you just talk to people. You know how to talk, don’t you?”

Apparently, I didn’t.

Once Blair pulled Elizabeth onto the floor, she fell easily into the songs rhythm. Blair slung her arms around Elizabeth’s neck and Elizabeth’s hands spanned her waist. Their hips moved perfectly, hypnotically in time.

Blair said something I lost in the music.

Elizabeth threw her head back again.

Blair pulled her arms tighter around her neck. She and Elizabeth were nose to nose. Blair closed her eyes, entranced by the music and Elizabeth. Elizabeth looked at Blair, now that she thought no one was looking, with a tender smile that spread slowly from the center of her face out to her dimples.

No.

Blair’s lashes fluttered open and she saw the way Elizabeth looked at her.

I would not stay in this corner any longer. I would not be just a fixture on this deck to these people, to Elizabeth. Maybe it was just one big game of chicken over my dignity: would I walk or wait for her to come over and talk to me, to dismiss me?

The song changed again, something slower.

Elizabeth and Blair slowed down; Elizabeth’s hands fell from her waist to her hips. They pressed their foreheads together.

There was a door inside right next to me. It led right to a hall and then the stairs that went to my bedroom. Why didn’t I leave earlier?

I did leave then. It took only one more second of seeing Elizabeth and Blair, foreheads, noses, hips, pressed together, breathing together like they wanted to melt into each other, for my mind to regain its control over my body. I turned off my phone and shoved it into the shallow pocket of my sweater. I closed the door behind me and set off down the dark corridor guided by my knowledge of the house alone. The determined gait of my walk jostled my phone out of my pocket. The thud it made on the carpet caught me by surprise. I stooped to pick it up when a sliver of light from the deck fell across the black screen, outlining Elizabeth’s shadow. I heard the behind me close, the same slow song as before lingering heavily in the still air.  
When I stood, Elizabeth was there in front of me, offering her hand, as if she had not just been pressed against Blair Ingram. She felt around on the wall for a second before flipping on the light switch. The hall was suddenly much brighter than it was, and the deck had been. We both blinked like newborn fawns.

“What’s up?” she asked.

I could not say anything—the same paralysis as before prevented me. Not that I knew how to answer such an inane question. ‘What’s up?’ You just made me watch ten minutes of you grinding on a girl a decade younger than you, which I can’t even fault you for because I really wish you would do it to me. But you left and came back and have Blair now. That’s ‘what’s up.’

I shrugged and stayed silent again.

“You should come back to the party,” she said.

I shook my head. “No ma’am but thank you.”

“You should have come out of your corner and mingled a little, or talked to me,” she continued. “Why didn’t you talk to me all night?” I was baffled by the hurt in her voice and the way her chic eyebrows pushed together, forming a wrinkle of deep concern.

My throat constricted and all I could think of was being stuck in my iron wrought chair in the corner, unable to even look away. “I didn’t know what to say,” I choked out over the lump forming in my throat. “And you were with…. people.”

Elizabeth scrunched up her nose and made a playful look of distaste. “Come on Jane, that’s—” Her thought seemed to stop there. Her expression melted back into one of concern. “You look different since I’ve come back.”

I was glad to get off the subject of the party and my leaving it. And by now, I knew her well enough to that I could combat her studying, piercing looks. I pushed my wispy hair behind my ear. “You weren’t gone so long, ma’am. How much could have changed really?”

How much could have changed really?

She smiled then bit her lip. “I guess you’re right. Maybe it’s a new diet?” She tried out the word like she was teasing me. She knew most of the time I just ate what Adele ate, tiptoeing around Jamie was a skill everyone learned soon enough.

I shook my head. A six-year-old’s diet hardly changed.

“Been hitting the gym then?” She punched my arm with each fist playfully.

I tried to suppress a giggle. “No ma’am.”

“Well, whatever you’re doing, it’s working,” she said broadly. Her gray eyes sparkled, but the line of concern above her brows remained. “What have you been doing?”

“How about my job?” I said with just the right mix of dry wit and bubbly humor to convince to her let it alone.

She stepped back, hands up in surrender. “Alright. School then?”

“You’re looking at a star student,” I bragged. I was proud that Elizabeth’s investment (and glowing recommendation) was not in vain—even if it was just art school and I was only in the second semester.

She smiled; she never seemed to see it that way. “Good. I’m glad.”

I wished that I did not depend so much on her good opinion and praise. It would have made her sudden disappearance, her long absence, her sudden appearance, Blair… it would have made it all more bearable.

She studied me for a moment longer and I could feel the power of her presence begin to bind me again. Sometimes she was fun single-mom Elizabeth and sometimes she was multi-billionaire CEO Elizabeth and I never knew when the transformation took place. This was CEO Elizabeth: powerful, sharp, and used to getting what she wanted. But then the tension fell from her shoulders and she chuckled, “God!” She was back to being Adele’s mother in an instant. Her voice was soft and fond. “Jane, you’re so pale I swear you could glow in the dark. You do know that you can still do your job and take Adele outside? I’d actually encourage it.”

I smiled as blood rushed to my face. I had gotten out to a good lead, but I think Elizabeth was winning this one. “You’re sure you’re alright?” she asked. She stepped closer to me and ducked her head to look me in the eye. Our noses almost brushed.

“Don’t you have guests?” I blurted out.

Elizabeth straightened up and groaned. “They won’t miss me for five minutes. Blair and I—“ Elizabeth pursed her lips, like she did with Adele sometimes. “You just look tired, depressed, frankly. You aren’t burning the candle on both ends, work and class, are you?” She crossed her arms, going into full blown mom mode.

“I’m fine” I insisted. “And you’re right, I am tired, but it’s fine.”

She waited for me to elaborate. I couldn’t. There it was, she said it herself: “Blair and I.” My stomach had already plummeted to my feet.

“Jane you look upset.”

“I’m not upset,” I said hastily, and a little shrilly. “I swear, it's all fine” My ever-constricting throat made my words break and the burning that spread over my skin reached my eyes. They were too dry. They itched. I blinked several times and hoped Elizabeth would think it was just the bright light behind her.

She tilted her head to the side in an attempt to be charming. “So, you aren’t going to come back outside with me?”

“No ma’am,” I said, an awkward laugh bursting through the lump in my throat.

“It might make you feel better to be around people. Or you can tell me what’s wrong. You know you can cry in front of me, Jane; I know you’re upset.” By the end of the sentence, she was no longer smiling and there was an edge of coldness in her voice.

She caught me. I could do nothing but let the welled-up tears spill over. I sniffed loudly, a desperate plea for my dignity.

She took my arm, which hung limply at my side. For a dreadful moment, I thought she was going to drag me back outside, but she took off further down the hall. She opened a random door, it led to a linen closet. “What are you doing?” I asked, finally.

“I don’t want anyone to wander in and see you like this.”

I looked up at her directly and took my arm from her. “You’d rather they find us in a closet together?”

She sighed and stopped, and I let her take my hand again. “Tell me, Jane, what’s wrong?” she repeated. She began to back into the closet, but I couldn’t take it. Not after I had spent the evening as furniture and had to witness Blair plastering herself to Elizabeth, I could not take her positioning and posturing and bending me to her will. Because she could. And I would let her.

“Ms. Rochester,” I said, trying and failing to tug my arm from her grasp. “Please, I really think I just need to go. Upstairs, to bed.”

She kept my wrist in her grip, her eyes grew wide. “Promise you’ll come down tomorrow night again, after your put Adele to bed. They really are all good people out there. And It will be my special project to make sure you have a good time.” Like tonight’s invitation, it was not a request. “I want you to be happy, Jane.” 

I looked her straight in the eye, though my vision blurred with tears that fell more freely than before. “I will,” I said.

Just like that, she released my wrist and began stalking down the hall.

When she let go, I had fully intended to flee upstairs and to my bedroom, but her abrupt changes never failed to stun me. I stood in the illuminated hall watching her go back to Blair and crying, still crying.

The bitter taste in my throat evoked the memory of the morning I found Elizabeth had gone. After I woke up Adele, fed her, took her to school, and promised her mommy would definitely, probably, hopefully be back soon, I ran back to my bedroom and sobbed. 

But I never cried in front of Elizabeth before.

“Jane,” she said urgently. She spun around so fast, I did not have time to conceal my tears. She took a few steps back before repeating in a lower, more tender voice than before, “Jane.”  
I never knew what she wanted from me. She always wanted me to divine paragraphs of meaning from a single, repeated word.

I could not. I shook my head and pressed my fists to my eyes so that I could not look at Elizabeth Rochester anymore, and she could not look at me. But my mind conjured up her round, sparkling eyes, her slightly agape red lips, her heaving chest. 

Why couldn’t she just leave me alone!

She took a long, steady breath. And I heard three receding steps. Then, “Goodnight Jane.”

**Author's Note:**

> Suggested song pairing: "Swimming" by Florence and the Machine and maybe a little bit of "Big God" too, but like, what angsty/pining love story doesn't go with it?  
> Thank you for reading. I hope to expand this story but I wrote this for a short story class.  
> If anyone wants to see my VERY rough first draft, it is in my works called "Shining and Swimming"


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